


a trust slowly gained

by Flora_Obsidian



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Evil Caleb AU, Ficlet, Gen, can it really be a ficlet when it's more than a thousand words, clearing out my wip folders, that's probably more of a oneshot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-19 06:07:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19969267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flora_Obsidian/pseuds/Flora_Obsidian
Summary: “Cay-leb!”The tiefling’s voice is high-pitched, sing-song, and it’s all the warning Bren gets before he finds an arm slung over his shoulder and half a face full of curly blue hair. Weeks of traveling on the road with this… this band of misfits has made him less likely to kill them for catching him off-guard; they are loud, and obnoxious, and chaotic, and tactile. Strangely, it isn’t enough to make him regret going undercover.Of course, nothing could make him regret that. He serves the good of the Empire, full stop.





	a trust slowly gained

**Author's Note:**

> First CR fic ya boi has ever written !! Here we go, I guess?
> 
> Inspired by: https://sockablock.tumblr.com/post/180632934260/well-americankimchi-just-proposed-an-au-where

“ _Cay-_ leb!”

The tiefling’s voice is high-pitched, sing-song, and it’s all the warning Bren gets before he finds an arm slung over his shoulder and half a face full of curly blue hair. Weeks of traveling on the road with this… this band of misfits has made him less likely to kill them for catching him off-guard; they are loud, and obnoxious, and chaotic, and _tactile_. Strangely, it isn’t enough to make him regret going undercover.

Of course, nothing could make him regret that. He serves the good of the Empire, full stop.

“Yes, Jester?” he answers, not looking up from his book until she puts a hand over the pages. His fingers twitch, but he lets her.

“We know you’re super invested in your books, and stuff, bu-ut the group kind of wanted to talk with you? It’s nothing bad, promise! _Pinky_ promise, even.” She smiles, a little nervous, and clasps her hands together. Bren slowly closes his book and starts reassessing the situation.

“Talk to me,” he repeats.

“Yes!” She nods, twice. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you that, I was just supposed to get you to come upstairs, but I didn’t want you to, y’know, freak out or anything if you walked into a room and we were all just sitting there _waiting_ , you know?”

“I… appreciate that.” They can’t have found out. Beauregard’s disturbing habit for mail theft aside, he knows that the post is usually secure and the details he doesn’t feel he should put to paper, he Sends to Master Ikithon. Jester’s tail is swishing back and forth, which means she’s anxious, but she really isn’t a good liar, and too trusting besides. This group, this Mighty Nein, they aren’t the best at strategy either. “Very well.”

He stands, lets Jester lead them up the stairs of the tavern they’ve chosen to stay in for the night in this little country town—quaint, ordinary, reminding him of Blumenthal though he hasn’t thought about the place he grew up in years. The noise of the tavern was irritating, but there was always information to be gained from sitting somewhere, unobtrusive, and listening, and so he had elected to stay downstairs while everyone else retired for the night. But now, he thinks, that they all left at once was most likely deliberate on their part.

Beauregard is sitting in one corner, with her stool tilted back on two legs and her feet propped up on the small bedside table. Mollymauk is sprawled lazily in the second chair, leaving Nott to sit on the edge of the mattress, with Fjord and Yasha standing slightly to the side. Jester shuts the door behind them as they walk in, but she flounces off to stand by the window, her skirts swishing behind her. They let him stay at the door. They aren’t blocking his exit, and none of their weapons are drawn.

Bren thinks, gauging their expressions, and honestly can’t come up with a reason for this gathering. The feeling is unpleasant.

“I got him here!” Jester declares. “But I also told him we wanted to talk, just saying.”

“Caleb is a smart boy!” Nott declares—it doesn’t bother him as much as it used to, for some reason, her praise. She drinks to excess and acts the very way which turns Master Ikithon’s disdain toward the common masses, and yet. She means it. Some part of this half-feral alcoholic looks at him and genuinely _cares_ , and Bren can’t come up with a reason for that either. “He would have figured it out once he got up here.”

“ _Ja_ ,” Bren allows. “So. What is this about?”

“It’s about you, dear,” says Mollymauk, and Bren can see how that casual sprawl of his limbs is just another carefully orchestrated circus act. “Nothing bad, nothing bad! I’m certainly the last one to judge about a man’s past.”

“We have all done… bad things,” Yasha continues. She is one of the Fallen. Bren can see the glint of _other_ when he looks at her, blood of the divine in her veins—blood corrupted, like the black which mars her silver-white hair. She would know about doing _bad things_. “In times before. But this is… now. Not then.”

“Yeah. I mean.” Beauregard, monk of the Cobalt Soul. Master Ikithon had suspected them of perhaps not working to the fullest extent they could in supporting the Empire. Beauregard could be the proof of that, or she could simply be a very bad monk. “Shit happens, y’know?”

“But we look out for each other.” Mollymauk is taking charge of this conversation, oddly enough. Bren takes note of it as the tiefling continues: “Cause we’re a bunch of assholes, no one is questioning that, but we look out for each other. It’s a group effort. Keep each other safe, like back in the circus.”

Eodwulf would laugh, long and hard, at the thought of Bren ever being in a circus troupe.

…Strange. He hasn’t thought of his old friends in years. It’s been so long since he’s seen them. Master Ikithon has sent them further and further out into the world, as the years have passed on.

“ _Ja_ ,” he says again, putting on a mildly confused expression, tilting his head ever so slightly to one side. “I know this. It is why I joined with you, remember?”

“Yes, but--!” Jester starts, stops, bites her lip. Fjord sighs and steps in.

“What we’re trying to say, Caleb, is that-- whatever has happened in the past, whatever happened to _you_ in the past, it doesn’t have to be that way anymore.

“What we’re all trying to say, with tact, or whatever, is that you don’t have to set everyone on fire because they pose a threat.” Beauregard folds her arms across her chest. Gruff, blunt. She really is a terrible monk, save for how good she is at punching things. “As in, _stop_ setting everyone on fire because they pose a threat.”

“That’s not _quite_ \--” Fjord starts, and Yasha opens her mouth to say something and closes it again, and Jester’s multi-syllabic _we-e-e-ll_ floats over the chorus of voices suddenly trying to make a point until Nott slams her flask against one of the bedposts.

“Obviously, killing people in self defense is kind of a _thing_ ,” she says, then taking a drink from said flask. “But whatever happened to you—and you don’t have to talk about that if you don’t want to—is behind you. You’re not _there_ anymore.”

“You’re free now, dear,” Mollymauk tells him with a smile. “You can lighten up.”

Bren says--

Bren says absolutely nothing.

For a moment, at least, he stays perfectly silent, eidetic memory turning over every movement, every interaction, every line of dialogue exchanged between him and this group over the past few weeks—of course. Of course. They have accepted _Caleb Widogast_ into their fold, have pieced together their own ideas of his story based off speculation and the lies Bren has fed them and the occasional quirk actually his slipping through. Have concluded that his withdrawn nature and the way he watches are a result of some trauma. Have decided that it is something to accept instead of be suspicious of, when really every moment he spends watching is another moment he can piece together _their_ weaknesses.

The road to get here has not been an easy one, this is true.

“Free,” he repeats. Jester nods so quickly that he wouldn’t be surprised if she managed to nod it off her shoulders.

“We _care_ about you, Caleb—don’t look at me like that! Family is family, and that means we care for each other.”

“I wouldn’t call us _family_ ,” Beauregard says, but Nott cuts in:

“We’ve given our blood to a sweaty blue man who lives underneath a bar because he said he’d pay us to work for him, that seems like the kind of stupid thing only family does together.”

“…That’s fair,” the monk agrees at last, failing to come up with a suitable counterpoint.

“Lighten up,” Mollymauk repeats, waving one hand through the air at nothing in particular. “Talk to someone, or get drunk, or get high—or all three, if that’s your thing! As long as you remember that whatever you’re running from, there’s nothing left to run from.”

Bren looks at the man in his ostentatious coat, painful eyesore of color, sharp teeth and crooked grin.

“…I will try to keep that in mind,” he says, because that’s something Caleb Widogast would say, and shifts to something wary and not-quite closed off. “…May I, ah. Return to my books, now? If you are done?”

Mollymauk says an easy, “Sure thing, dear,” before anyone else can speak, and Bren backs out the door and down the hallway to his own room with a nearly-Hasted speed. Leomund’s Tiny Hut. Alarm. Frumpkin, purring at the foot of the bed.

He opens his book to the page he had been on for close to an hour in the tavern downstairs, when he had been people-watching, with every intent of _reading_ this time. It isn’t until the ticking clock in the back of his mind tells him, _eleven o’clock_ a handful of beats before the bells in the town begin to chime that he realizes he has barely taken in the first paragraph and none of the second.

It takes a strangely long time to fall asleep that night.


End file.
